New Miner Wars 2081 Pre-Alpha Available!

(SKIP TO THE END TO SEE WHERE TO GET THE TEST BUILD SETUP FILE)

Eight months have passed since our last release – and today we are proud to announce our new Pre-Alpha Test Build, available to our community of testers, contributors and fans! The Public Build should be available within 24 hours (August 31st). The list of new features is as follows, first let me explain a bit about the release concept.

Pre-Alpha indicates that we are still testing the engine and functionality rather than fleshing out the representative gameplay features. Our team has been focusing on the development of a solid core engine, while also underlying and nourishing all of the upcoming content. All new features go to the Test Build first – and once all the newly implemented features become stable and polished, they make their way into the Public Build for everyone to download.

More exciting beta versions are coming in the near future! So stay with us and watch the developmental progress of Miner Wars while you have the opportunity to contribute your own ideas, remarks and add even game content to make the Miner Wars even better! We are constantly improving the game, fulfilling our original vision and adjusting it according to your feedback!

Important: Most features in this release are still in the experimental stage and therefore are in an unfinished state which is subject to change. Depending on your particular system, you may also experience performance issues, since the game core still needs a lot of testing and optimization. We are also testing a new method for voxel map textures, therefore all the asteroids come with the same texture (instead of different texture for each material like in previous release).

New Features

The in-game editor and prefab modules: Build your own space ship, space station or any sort of space-like edifice you can think of. These structures are be made from prefab modules, and in the future we’re looking to feature ’total destructibility’ for these objects. Prefab modules include tunnels, lattices, beams and panels as well as diverse chambers and special devices. You can also upload your hand-made sectors to the server and let your friends play them! We are looking forward to your comments and suggestions, especially the interface and usability of our editor. Some of the prefabs are not 100% finished – you can recognize them easily because of their purple color with no real texture – you can still use those, it just won’t look that pretty (yet!).

Coming Soon…

Upcoming game and editor features:

- Modular mothership weapons - large weapons and turrets that can aim and shoot at enemy! - Special prefab types - lights, speakers, particle generators. - Personality-Based AI Behavior and Group AI Behavior – simply set the AI behavior within the editor, choosing from several pre-scripted AI pilot and commander behaviors (coward, aggressive, sharpshooter, defensive and more). - Event-driven music – many new music tracks programmed to fit within the context of the current gameplay situation (fight, chase, harvest, deep space...). - Special prefab types - lights, speakers, particle generators. - - Hundreds of new sounds by Dan Wentz and prefabs from our 3D artists were made (link), they are just waiting to be brought to life and interlinked with other game content.

Customer Related Issues

How can I gain access to the Test Build?

All of those who are eligible already know how to aquire it – you can make sure by checking your profile (http://www.minerwars.com/Profile.aspx). The Test Build is available to our beta testers, earliest customers (first adopter reward) and donors, who contributed over 30 EUR for the game development. Since the first adopter reward is not available anymore, you have two options if you seriously want to get your hands on the Test Build – you can either become a contributor by donating for the development or you can try your best and work hard to get noticed by someone from our team and be hand-picked as a beta-tester. This may include posting ideas on forums, reporting alpha-related issues and contributing models or other game content.

What are the differences in Test Build?

The Test Build also offers some extra developmental features – for example, we have a lot of keys under F1...F12. All of them are available in Test Build, but will never be available in Public Build. F11 and F12 are especially interesting, you can play with various developer settings, see hidden buffers, enable / disable lights, see game statistics etc.

Increased Release Frequency

Starting with this release, we plan to begin publishing new builds of the game more frequently, so you can keep more up-to-date with us. We will do our best and try to bring you the next release during September.

Marek Rosa Introduces New Producer

As you may have noticed above, we have a new member of our team – Jan Jirkovsky. Jan has over eight years of experience with programming, game development and journalism. He has on record several freeware computer games, hundreds of game reviews and also a recently published book about game development (in Czech). Both the book and his latest space shooter game Project Ignis convinced me to ask him to become a member of the Miner Wars team. Being a skilled producer and a jack-of-all-trades in the video game industry, Jan will take care of most of the PR stuff, internal and external documentation as well as other various assignments on Miner Wars 2081 and other Keen Software House projects.

For this release you have to download a separate file, since auto-updater functionality has been temporarily disabled. We apologize for this inconvenience.

It also means that you can uninstall your previous copy of Miner Wars since this new will be a separate installation. BTW, don't worry you loose nothing. This is only about setup files that can be always downloaded and installed.

Important: Most features in this release are still in experimental and unfinished state and are subject to change. You might also experience performance issues, since the game core still needs a lot of testing and optimizations. We are also testing new method for voxel map textures, therefore all the asteroids come with the same texture (instead of different texture for each material).

I'm liking most of the new update. One big issue for me though; the current mouse control in the menus feels really odd. The mouse cursor is sluggish and floaty. Not that I'm expecting the test build to be perfect, I just want to make sure you're aware.

Seriously, I don't have any doubts about the good intentions of Marek and the rest of the team.I really think they are trying to do the best they know in order to give us the best playing experience with this game.

I will say the following with the best constructive intention, only to aport my 2 cents in a positive way.

As you must have noticed, there is a lot of people confused/upset/angry/sad because they (we) just wanted to be able to use the new version openly teased and promised indiscriminately for the 30th aug.

I there were 2 different dates (30th and 31th) for different people, then please, don't make a public promise of the 30aug openly in the forum. That creates confusion.

Make it simple! We don't wan't to dig in the search box to be able to understand if we are entitled to public/test build or if we are early adopters or not, or what that all means!

Make it simple. If you have an internal release date that is valid for only a reduced group of people (let's call them test-build'ers), then broadcast that date privately *ONLY* to that reduced group of people. I'm sure you have the list of emails ot the test-build'ers, then send private messages to them.

And only broadcast publicly in the forum the date (31th) that is available to the rest of us (public-build'ers).

I agree with the BootyBandit. I mean, at LEAST, if you're going to give beta-testers who paid the "support fee" or what have you, tell them about it privatly? It's almost like a marketing scheme, but mainly it just skeeves us pre-alpha buyers off in my own unformatted opinion :P

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LOCKED 7/11/2012 2:35:50 PM, Old PRE-ALPHA topic

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